Live 1/5/89 at The Stone; San Francisco, CA
---Review by Steffan Chirazi
The iron guts of rock 'n' roll spew out in a viriolic mess. Heaven
really is red and black and Danzig are tearing away the fleshy,
flaccid walls of club rock to leave a stark, shiny and cliniaclly
brilliant new model in it's place.
Beneath the fingernails of Danzig lie the putrid remains of stale and
bored old rock whores, too cliched to know, too stupid to care, too
plagiaristic to understand how beautiful an element can be glorified
to create something so big, so large and so disgustingly mighty that
people throw themselves off walls like lemmings savagely looking for
their death.
I was part of a sold-out pack of wild happy dogs (believe me, we were
all dogs), baying and snarling, frothing like the rabid, sinking
teeth into every juicy morsel of sound that was flung our way. Grade
A, USDA-approved real red meat. They don't make incisors sharp enough
to tear at that stuff. You have to file your own.
In the way that only a great rock 'n' roll show can, Danzig make you
feel nihilistic, masochistic even. And the sound was so fucking great
I didn't miss a thing.
Christ's guitar stood toe to toe with every fucker in the building;
nose to nose, spitting into the face, whacking you around the head
with savage rhythm and picking your brain with clean splintered lead
breaks.
Von psychoed his way through the show, a human tapped into the power
outlet, a charge sending him into convulsive fits of action and
electric four-string chewing. Biscuits is a remarkable drummer, not
only in style, but in the way he loses himself inside his
single-mounted tom and various floor drums. And Danzig?
If God gave anyone a voice since Presley and Orbison, it was Glenn
Danzig. It is a voice of melting qualities, its pure and unashamed
soulfulness enough to break you down into pieces. The man himself is
a stomach knot of muscles, all twisting and writhing against each
other to propel Danzig into the ugly face of his followers. He jumps
like strewn up tension and anger, he screams with pure chilling
killer, he flexes with the type of aggression that only the finest
rock 'n' roll can give you.
'Possession', 'Not of this World', 'Twist of Cain', 'Mother'- all
propellers into the land of immortality, all maggots into the brain,
all defiant of everything and anything. If Alex of 'A Clockwork
Orange' had been into Danzig instead of Beethoven, those bastards
wouldn't have got within miles of him. Because however hard you try
to escape him (sadly some do) you can't once you've heard it.
Danzig jammed with Hetfield and Hammett, but as great as that was it
didn't add to the show any, merely another part of it. Indeed, it
served to illustrate that both are as magnetised by him as we are
(and if you're not, catch the drift).
Yes, Danzig played Misfits tunes, and yes, they were good. But I
wouldn't have cared if they didn't, because Danzig now is Danzig
strong. Stronger than most you can throw at me. In my heart I bled
for this show, I bled with pure and utter pleasure. It felt religeous
in its own way, because Danzig stirred a feeling inside that I
haven't felt at a club for years. Definitely one of the gigs of the
years...already.